New back screen door!
Jenny and I had a little adventure today. We started out with a trip to our new ReStore here in New Kensington. That is a completely awesome place! I liked Construction Junction in Pittsburgh, but I always had issues getting there when they were open. This place has great hours, plus they are literally within walking distance of our house! Well, if we want to actually bring anything home, we would probably want to drive there. We found a great chandelier with hanging stained-glass globes. We also found an awesome cabinet that I think would be perfect in our kitchen. We didn’t buy that yet, but I think it might be on our list.
We came home with our new find and ate some lunch. Then we decided to head up to Lowe’s to get a new screen door for the back door and a few other small things. We wanted to get the screen door for the back door for a while, but with Annie’s shower coming up, we wanted to have something in place back there soon. We ended up finding a door style that we liked, but they only had it in vinyl. We ended up getting it anyway. When we someday turn that room back into a back porch, we’ll have to get two doors anyway, and we’ll get wooden doors that match at that time.
On our way out, I spotted a stack of Delta T2 table saw fences in the tool section. They were on sale. One of them accidentally jumped into our cart. 🙂 Installing that will be a trip, I’m sure, but I’m excited about having a really accurate fence on that saw. I haven’t even had a chance to unbox it yet, of course. Maybe tomorrow.
After we got home from that trip (and I got soaked tying the new screen door to the car roof), I headed down to the workshop to get working on the super secret project. Between work on it yesterday and today, I’ve made some good progress. I got to a good stopping point, and took a break to work on the screen door installation. The back door used to have a crappy aluminum screen/storm door of atrocious quality. That eventually fell apart (literally, it fell apart when someone opened it during a party here and the stile with the handle just completely came off of the door, and the whole thing collapsed into a heap of aluminum parts on the ground). I never removed the last bit of aluminum frame from that door, so I started work on that. I took all of the screws out of the side that had the old hinges on it, and that part came off quickly and easily. I turned to the other side, and discovered that someone had decided to attach this with an entire tube of caulk. Then, apparently after it was installed, they used another entire tube to slather all over the trim and frame again. That involved an hour or so of cutting large hunks of caulk off of the door frame. They apparently used the same treatment on the top frame part, but it was easier to handle simply because it was shorter.
Looking at what I was left with pointed clearly towards the fact that I was going to have to re-caulk the places that actually had to be sealed, and re-paint the crappy, peeling, dirt-stained trim. Argh. So I got the primer, white paint, and caulk gun and went crazy. While waiting for the paint and everything to dry, I installed the door hardware and got it ready to hang. I ended up hanging the door and leaving it propped open so that the inside corners of the frame could finish drying–they were still a little wet when I was finished.
While I was working on all of that stuff, Jenny was going cleaning-crazy in the house. Every time I came in to get a tool or something, Jenny was busy cleaning a different part of the house. The house looks and smells great now.
Now I’m exhausted, and it’s definitely bedtime. More work to do tomorrow, but it’s all good.
jonathan
